I have been following Hurd for years and I must say that right now (and for perhaps a year) there seems to be a more focused effort take make it stable and make it work, using gnumach as the kernel.
The chase for a new micro kernel is still on but very much a more academic exercise happening in parallel and in a slow pace from what I can tell.
The GNU Hurd project still suffers from not enough developers to do the work that is needed.
The ambition to port OpenJDK 7 to Hurd (and fixing things in core places as needed) is an excellent way of making it more stable.
Archhurd has proven that DDE is possible to use as a driver layer and while I was skeptical to have drivers in userland, I now see that it is an excellent way of getting drivers with less effort and ok performance. It It is not like the freebsd layer in Haiku (which I think is in privileged kernel land) but the goals are different between the OSes. DDE fits perfectly into Hurd.